“Oh,” she said.
Helena got a hand on her mother’s arm. “Mama. Let’s go back in, we needn’t do this here, there are people not twenty feet from this door?—”
“Take your hand off my arm, Helena.”
Lady Rosenhall did not look at her daughter. She was looking at Dominic with a calm Annabelle had never once seen on her, not even the afternoon James had gone missing for an hour and a half. Her gaze went from his open collar to Annabelle’s loosened hair and back again slowly, her mouth thin and white at the edges.
“Your Grace.” Her voice had dropped to something very flat. “You will explain to me what I am looking at.”
“Lady Rosenhall—” Annabelle started.
“I am not addressing you.” She did not raise her voice, which was somehow worse than if she had. “I am addressing the Duke of Silverford, who has just removed his mouth from your person in my garden, in my sight, with my own daughter standing beside me as a witness to it.” Her hand pressed harder at her collarbone, the knuckles gone white where they met her own skin. “You haveruinedher.”
“Mama—” Helena tried again, both hands on her mother’s arm now.
“You have ruined her.” Lady Rosenhall said it a second time, even louder. “In a place as common as a…garden!”
“Please…” Annabelle came off the wall, found her footing, and approached Lady Rosenhall, as if her own body in the spacebetween them might absorb some part of the devastation. “Please, lower your voice. Someone will hear.”
“Someone has already seen, Annabelle, which is rather the point I am making.” Lady Rosenhall hissed with her hand still pressed to her own throat as though she might be ill. She drew a breath, straightened her spine another inch, and turned the whole of her attention back to Dominic. “You will do the only honorable thing left to a man in your position, Your Grace. You will marry her.”
Annabelle’s stomach dropped. The light from the open door lay across the gravel in its long yellow stripe, and within it neither Lady Rosenhall nor Dominic so much as shifted their weight. Annabelle found she was holding her own breath along with everyone else’s.
“I cannot.” He said.
It came out of him fast, before Annabelle had finished bracing for whatever answer was coming, before she had even understood that a question had been put to him at all.
“I beg your pardon?” Lady Rosenhall scoffed.
“I cannot marry her.” He said it again, steadier the second time, which somehow made it worse than the first.
He had not looked at Annabelle since they’d been found.
No, he was looking at Lady Rosenhall, his jaw set hard enough that she could see the muscle working at the side of it, both hands at his sides now, as though he had decided where to put them and meant to hold them there by force of will alone.
“She deserves a man who can offer her a household worth living in. A name without—” He stopped, started over. “A better man than I am. That is not modesty, Lady Rosenhall. It is fact, and you would do well to take my word for it, rather than my title.”
Dominic looked at her properly then, for the first time since the door had opened. “I am not trying to spare myself, Annabelle.” He whispered, his voice meant for her alone, even with two other women standing close enough to hear it. “I am trying to spare you a lifetime of a man like me. You do not know what that costs a woman. I do.”
“I—” she began, but Lady Rosenhall cut her off.
“Your opinion of your own character,” Lady Rosenhall continued, turning back to him, “is not the matter under discussion, Your Grace. I have always found you a man who understands consequence even when he dislikes it, Your Grace. I expect you to understand this one.” She drew a breath that pulled audibly through her nose. “I will write to your brother tonight. He will know what is owed his sister, and he will see that it is collected. Whether you find yourself amenable to the collecting or not.”
“No.” The word came out of Annabelle before she had decided to say it, fast and small. “No, please—not Lucien. If he learns, he will?—”
She could not finish the sentence. She did not need to.
A duel between her brother and the Duke of Silverford would ensue.
“I cannot to leave His Grace uninformed of his sister’s circumstances.”
“Lady Rosenhall,please,” Annabelle stepped closer, close enough now to see the genuine distress beneath the older woman’s composure, the way her hands had begun to tremble where they were folded at her waist, the way her eyes were too bright in the dim light of the garden. “Please. I am asking you. Don’t write to him. Whatever happens here, let it happen here, between the three of us, without?—”
“Without your brother learning that his sister was compromised in a garden while I sat inside congratulating myself on chaperoning her well?” Lady Rosenhall’s voice cracked clean across the middle of the sentence.
“That is not fair.” Helena’s voice now, sharper than Annabelle had ever once heard from her. “Mama, that is not fair to her. You cannot stand there and punish her?—”
“I am not punishing her, Helena, I am naming what has happened, and I would thank you not to confuse the two simply because the second one frightens you more than the first.” Lady Rosenhall did not look away from Annabelle as she said it, though her voice gentled by a fraction, the correction of a woman who noticed everything delivered with more care than its content suggested. “I take no pleasure in saying any of this. But it remains true regardless of my feelings about saying it, and your feelings about hearing it will not change that either, however much courage you summon to argue with me.”
